- From: Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:51:30 -0700
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, www-talk <www-talk@w3.org>
* Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> [2010-04-14 17:54+0200] > On 14 Apr 2010, at 17:09, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote: > >I wrote a little piece of code to simulate growth of > >a social network; [...] > I like this approach, and expect this data-driven exploration (even > if simulated data) could help get reputation-based, distributed > trust out of the eternal "someday pile". > > However in everyday business, sheer unadulterated evil ( Spam, fraud > etc ie. generally clear-cut mischief) is one huge problem amongst > many. Mailing lists, blogs etc can also suffer from > over-enthusiastic participants whose contributions aren't quite > right (in volume, tone or theme) for that forum. I am curious how > far into that space we can go, and whether a common design can > handle the spam problem and also help with fuzzier questions of > authority, trust and interestingness. How far do you see it going in > that direction? Is this just for 'evil people', or also 'foolish > actions'? I have always envisioned this working something like: Each contribution to the community would allow an up or downvote from anyone in the community; a contribution could be anything from an email message to a blog comment to a wiki or spec edit. Users would accrue reputation points based on these votes, where the amount of influence anyone has is proportional to their existing karma within the community. (so a +1 from a spammer is basically worthless, or possibly even negative) If influence is proportionate to existing karma, we'd need to seed things somehow; maybe in the context of W3C it could stem from a single person (timbl, or some overall community manager), or W3C staff or chairs could each be assigned 100 karma points. Then they just need to upvote a few people to start distributing karma among all contributors. Once we have a bit of reputation data we can start using it to do things like block spam, and to discover the more interesting contributions to high-volume forums. I have used a number of sites that allow community ratings like this (e.g. slashdot, reddit), but their underlying workings have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I wonder if anyone has published a comparison of various algorithms used by sites like advogato, slashdot et al. oh, taking a look at the advogato trust metric just now, I see it uses trusted seeds as well: The computation of the trust metric is performed relative to a "seed" of trusted accounts. At the time of this writing (22 Feb 2000), the seed consists of raph, miguel, federico, and alan. -- http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html I try to keep track of related things on this page http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2005/08/reputation.html but the more I get into it, the more I realize how little I know. e.g. "How badly designed reputation systems create in-game mafias" http://boingboing.net/2009/10/07/how-badly-designed-r.html says it's a bad idea to publish negative karma scores which wouldn't have occurred to me. and apparently there's an entire book about this stuff http://buildingreputation.com/doku.php (I like to think a good algorithm could marginalize the amount of damage that could be done something like the sims mafia.) Maybe we can just start building systems at W3C that allow up/downvotes, then play with various algorithms to see what works, and observe what patterns emerge over time. (and when nogoodniks come along and try to game the system, we change the game ;) i.e. tweak the algorithm -- Gerald Oskoboiny http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/ World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/ tel:+1-604-906-1232 mailto:gerald@w3.org
Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2010 22:51:32 UTC